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President Donald Trump’s administration is close to implementing a rule that would end long-standing legal protections for whistleblowers among senior federal employees, according to documents reviewed by Reuters, prompting backlash from lawyers representing government workers.Â
The rule, if finalized, would follow Trump’s April proposal to change employment standards for federal workers and build on a series of actions by the administration to minimize dissent across the government.Â
Specifically, the documents showed the rule would exclude senior employees from legal protections that prohibit U.S. government agencies from retaliating against whistleblowers who accuse them of wrongdoing, such as violating the law or wasting funds.
Whistleblowers help to uncover fraud, abuse and misconduct inside government agencies that might otherwise remain hidden from Congress and the public.
“This administration is making good on its determination to silence dissent in all forms, creating a culture of fear, silence and intimidation,” said Andrew Bakaj, chief legal counsel of Whistleblower Aid, a non-partisan group that represents government whistleblowers, in a statement.Â
The Trump administration said in a statement that the employees would not be stripped of protections, although it said the rule would put individual federal agencies in charge of enforcing those safeguards.
The statement said the administration had made it clear in its April proposal that the employees would not have the law’s safeguards, pointing to a footnote in the proposal that cites the protection law. That footnote, however, did not use the word “whistleblower.”
The White House staff is preparing a new policy on “accountability” in the civil service, according to a government website, although it did not indicate the content. The rule would become final upon publication in the Federal Register.
The U.S. government would be “taking away whistleblower protections from the people who are likely to be best positioned to identify misconduct,” said Erik Snyder, a federal employment lawyer at Gilbert Employment Law.
The Trump administration has taken a number of actions to dissuade whistleblowers from accusing federal agencies of wrongdoing.
In the first weeks of his second term, Trump fired former President Joe Biden’s choice to lead the Office of the Special Counsel, which handles whistleblower disclosures from most civilian federal employees. Trump’s nominee to replace him, Paul Ingrassia, withdrew from Senate consideration following a report that he had described himself as having a “Nazi streak.”
Trump also fired internal watchdogs for at least 17 government agencies shortly after taking office in January. An inspector general is an independent position that conducts audits and investigations into allegations of waste, fraud and abuse of power.
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Federal workers affected by the promised loss of whistleblower protections would also be easier to fire, according to documents reviewed by Reuters.Â
The Office of Personnel Management, the government’s HR team, earlier this year estimated that the policy would apply to 50,000 positions.
The documents reviewed by Reuters specified that employees determined by the administration to be in “confidential, policy-determining, policy-making, or policy-advocating” jobs in the federal government would lose their whistleblower protections.
(Reporting by Courtney Rozen and Sarah N. Lynch in Washington; Editing by Edmund Klamann and Leslie Adler)
